Africa Museum in Tervuren

International FishBase and SeaLifeBase Symposium – 2023

Africa Museum in Tervuren

Africa Museum in Tervuren. Photo by Jean Housen, Wikimedia Commons.

The Sea Around Us partner, FishBase, is the largest global information system on fishes. It provides encyclopaedical information on all described fishes and includes many tools for scientists in a large array of ichthyological disciplines. With about 700,000 visits per month, it is the most successful database on any group of living organisms.

SeaLifeBase complements the success of FishBase and has become an important platform for information on non-fish marine organisms.

Since 2001, FishBase is supported by an international consortium that includes the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren as a founding member. After three successful meetings in 2007, 2012 and 2017, the Museum will again hold the steering committee meeting (4 to 8 September 2023), and will organize, on Monday 4 September, an open Symposium in hybrid format that is focusing on fish diversity and aquatic databases, bringing together various approaches used to study this fascinating vertebrate group and the marine environment.

Scientists from within and outside the consortium will present results on a wide range of studies on fishes, from the local to the global scale, from morphology to genetics, from fundamental to applied, from data-poor to data-rich areas, from databases to models.

Some of the speakers already confirmed are Cornelia Nauen (Mundus maris, Belgium), Jessica Meeuwig (University of Western Australia, Australia), Fabrice Teletchea (Université de Lorraine, France), Daniel Pauly (University of British Columbia, Canada), Rainer Froese (Helmholtz-Centre for Ocean Research (GEOMAR), Germany), Athanassios Tsikliras (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece), Austin Humphries (University of Rhode Island, USA), Nazli Demirel (Institute of Marine Sciences and Management, Turkey), Lauren Sallan (Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan), Patrick Pata (University of British Columbia, Canada) and Peter Mullen (Sunbird Images OHG, Germany).

You can see the full schedule here:

FishBase Symposium 2023 - Schedule

Those interested in giving a presentation are requested to submit their proposal to Tobias Musschoot (tobias.musschoot(AT)africamuseum.be) with an abstract including:
• Title.
• Author(s): full first and last name(s) (last name in capitals) of all authors; please underline presenting author.
• Affiliation(s): full name of institution, city and country. In superscript to indicate different institutions.
• Abstract: in English, max. 400 words excluding title, author(s), affiliation(s).
• No key words.
• Email address of corresponding author.

Deadline for abstract submission is August 13, 2023.